Mayer Spivack (1936 - 2011) is @MayerSpivack on Twitter. He was a consultant and advisor on organizational behavior, innovation, and learning, based near Boston, Massachusetts. He was also an artist working in a variety of media. All writing and artworks presented here are the original work and are the copyrighted property of Mayer Spivack. Nothing on this weblog is aggregated from other sources. Reasonable use involving copying with attribution, and limited sharing not for profit, are allowed. Your comments are invited. This blog is now maintained by his son, Nova Spivack. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your interest.

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7 posts categorized "learning disability"

May 31, 2009

(Please follow me at @MayerSpivack on Twitter for further articles and discussion)

Perhaps I am overreacting to a query at the end of an article discussing the implications of Quantum entanglement in organic environments—Technology Reviewby K. Birgitta Whaley et al. at the Berkeley Center for Quantum Information and Computation as published in Quantum Physics — but writing from the bottom of my limbic system, here goes —.

If there ever was an organ
that might benefit from quantum entanglement it is the brain. If there is a system in the brain that would benefit most from entanglement it will involve associative process. Consider:

Quantum entanglement for
information storage at the origin and terminus of nerve fibers in the brain
might allow instantaneous signal processing at multiple locations within the
brain that have in the past become associatively categorized and connected. This
would make the brain operate as a far more energy-efficient organ. It could run
cooler, require less sugar-fuel, and have a faster response-time and be free of
the time-lag that is a product of transmission speed as a function of nerve
fiber length. Cells located a few inches apart could be called upon to fire
instantaneously (speed of light? no measurable speed?) and perhaps also to act
simultaneously (seizure? migraine? consciousness?).

Pushing the envelope of the
possible, credible and the probable:

Were it possible that
entangled particles could be found at both ends of nerves, and that this
entanglement could be produced not only in entangled pairs, but among great
entangled families or multiples (think of: neural web), in other words—that
they could be replicated, and their tangled-together potential to interconnect could
be maintained over time by some yet unknown and unobserved mechanisms—then—quantum
entanglement might yield advantages in associative processing power and speed within the brain.

Assume
that associative memory and recall processing, (including processes of
attention direction, memory formation, and memory recall) involves a great
number of cerebral cortex end-point locations that are discrete and
separate cells. The origins (in space, time, and entanglement) of these
connections would lie somewhere among sensory systems and within the limbic
lumps.

For associative connections
to be made among many such end-points, transmission and process speed would
benefit from (and perhaps require) multiple simultaneous real-time connections among
a plurality of distal end-points that were first entangled when sensory, attention
or thought stimuli first originated at a sensory organ or from within somewhere
in the limbic system, or within the cerebral cortex itself (as in the case of
thought and imagination).

If quantum entanglement
among a myriad of endpoint memory cells and attention systems or cortical cells
were possible, then it might allow the communication structure of the brain to
bypass the expensive problem of wiring and wire-maintenance among all these
points. This would mean that the actual dissectable structure of the brain
would diverge from how information travels within it. The brain is complex
enough already and we are still stumped by it all.

This divergent independent
network of fast linkages would allow a kind of 'wireless neurological network'
with instantaneous interconnections and throughput to create what we call thinking and consciousness (two quite different phenomena, neither of which has
been proven to exist, at least for many people).

There is nothing outrageous
about a suggestion that quantum entanglement may be operating within the brain,
except that I am the clearly unqualified person discussing it with you.

What may be unique about my spin (intentional pun) on the subject is that I emphasize the advantages for the highly interconnected requirements of associative processing and memory as differentiated from logical, cognitive, or other operations.

May 30, 2009

I think of the word intuition and the word insight as far too-comfortable and simplistic euphemisms for complex
associative / syncretic /concilliative processes that operate in the brain all
the time, and that we are too lazy to examine. We use the words intuition
and insight to cover up the fact that we do not know how creativity
operates, or what it really is. I don’t trust many of the words in common use
that have to do with the mind and the brain, and with thought.

I never allow myself to deceive myself by using these words.
Words are like stage ‘magicians’ who are distract us from what is really
happening to the rabbit. Words like these, unexamined operational terms, have
the reflexive effect of make us incurious and complacent. In this case, we end
up remaining ignorant and believing in magic instead of science.

Intuition and insight are usually identified as the sources of ideas and
sudden insights. Not so. We and our accumulated experiences, and the amassed brain
associations among superficially dissimilar (but deeply similar) things are the
sources of our own creativity.

Because I need to understand how creativity works, I
reject the illusions of intuition and insight.

May 28, 2009

Please watch the video about
the work of the artist Esref Armagan at the end of this posting.

It presents a credible
record of the process of a Turkish artist, Esref Armagan, born blind, who
nonetheless draws and paints. Despite the ‘common sense’ impression one might
have that this is a trick, his is not a ‘supernatural’ ability or parlor trick in
which he attempts to convince us that the blind can see. The video demonstrates
quite solidly how he is able to conceive of and draw what he can only touch and
walk around.

This calm and humble man has
the desire, as does any artist, to make images. What is unusual and provokes
our interest is that he cannot see because he was born blind. Yet, he makes
images of objects and places that he can only know by touching and moving
through and around them, and presumably by hearing sound reflected and
refracted from their surfaces. Listen closely outside to the echoes in a quiet public
square. You will hear this effect when the environment is relatively free of
motor noise. Go to Venice and learn that the whole city is an echoic symphony.

His memory of shape, form,
and space are apparently a combination of tactile, kinetic, and probably
acoustic (passive echo-location) sensory and cognitive abilities and skills.

I think that there are
important lessons here! Mr. Armagan is not a freak talent but in some ways is an
ordinary and true artist. For us who pour over images on websites, drawing and
painting have become a kind of faux litmus test of intelligence and creativity
in animals, and we have become accustomed to novel u-tube videos featuring elephants
and other animals that can paint. We know chimps can make images of sorts.
Those animals have been trained to draw by humans, and/or have found some
pleasure in moving colors around. Those videos should not be compared in any
way with this one. Blind people are not elephants.

This video documents a man
making art using the neurological equipment and talents he was born with, just
as do other artists, myself included, (sculpture).

Sculpture-making, at least for
me, is a process, similar to the kind of 'seeing' Mr. Armagan describes and
demonstrates. What he does is quite familiar. When I am working on a piece of
sculpture, images of form 'arrange themselves' in my mind's eye. There is no ‘muse’
in my mind. I am doing the arranging, and the eye I speak of here is truly in
my mind’s visual center, but it feels much as if I am watching a mind-controlled
computer-graphics display filling out an image. This envisioning may occur voluntarily
or involuntarily with my real eyes open or closed. I can do this any time I
need to imagine an object. In any case, I choose to do much of my most
successful decision-making and preparatory conceptualization work just as I am about
to sleep in order to take advantage of the leverage of hypnagogic imagery.

Most often, when I am
intensely creative and productive, I intentionally set aside some time before
sleep to consciously think about alternative ways of solving a formal or other
problem for the next day’s studio work, and am able to evolve and to ‘watch’
various alternative solutions develop on the screen of my mind. I have learned
though that I must consciously ‘tell myself’ that I will remember all these
images when I am awake and able to draw or write them to paper or computer. Occasionally,
if I am fortunate, this process continues while I dream. This sleep-work is a
great boost to my studio work.

These images, particularly
the ones that I choose as the better ones, then become multi-sensory and
sometimes synesthetic impressions.Nearly always they combine into visual ideas or visual thought having
qualities of tactility, form, space, time, place (location), material (wood,
steel, copper etc.), mass, weight, size, structure, balance, motion, color,
texture, , light absorption and reflectivity, shadow, highlight, (and myriads of other qualities).

Visual thought integrates
the relationships among all these parts, giving to my imagined sculpture a high
degree of apperceived realism. I can rotate the envisioned object, observe it
from various angles, inspect it internally and externally for contradictions
and mechanical interferences and failures in structural logic. Making the piece
the next day in the studio is then a matter of completing this previously envisioned
solution, and inventing changes to it as the work progresses.

The analogy that comes to
mind is as if my brain were able to compose, code, and send the output data (via
a buffer) to a printer (my hands), to ‘print’ by representing the original
visual thoughts in three dimensions, or more, (my work often involves movement
and time). This print-out of the whole pre-conceived artwork develops like film
in a darkroom tray as I work during the next days or weeks. Many of my pieces
go on like this for a year or more.

All this internal
envisioning and real-time studio work is a compelling experience that one does
better as one works.

November 12, 2003

I have a longtime friend who thinks in seven levels at once. He is not admired for this ability, instead, most people find his conversation confusing; he skips around from subject to subject, changes times of reference, sensory modalities, and other dimensions of normal conversation. His discussion drifts, we are soon in a sea of ideas, lost. I ask: “what were we talking about?” He looks at me as if I were simple. Have I been inattentive? I am unsure and confused, after half an hour, I think I am losing my mind.

When first my consciousness surfaced this morning from the night-long swim through sleep, I directed my attention to remembering a photograph of a woman who has been traveling much too long, someone I love, whose photograph I have looked at often, and with serious consideration during the writing of these essays.
While these sentiments may be important to her and myself, they are also important to my subject. I have been motivated to regard this image, to find charming details, new discoveries, to memorize it. I know this photograph. I have searched it almost microscopically for meaning. I also know other photographs, for there are many photographs that I admire as art, that I have examined carefully. This one is not art, only a snapshot. Before opening my eyes I readied myself to observe the experience of remembering this photograph. It happens fast. First there is no photo, then as I become aware that I intend to remember it, it is there in memory. But what has “appeared”, and where is it? What kind of representation am I examining so earnestly? Can I actually see it “in my minds eye”?

October 31, 2003

I am not Gregor Samsa, but as I awoke this morning from complicated dreams I found my chin and chest transformed into a bed for a black cat.

My chin and chest belong to cats at the beginning and end of the day. However, what made this morning unusual was that I had gone to sleep after reading the first half of the wonderful prose, recently published in The New Yorker, of Gabriel Garcia Marquez entitled “personal History, The Challenge” (Oct. 6 2003, pg. 100, [as in “One Hundred Years Of Solitude”—this, in the New Yorker, could not be accidental].

Marquez, in his fantastic and real meditations is always more accurate about human experience than most psychology, because as he states in his article, he… “realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects possible: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart.” And so he made a lifelong project to become infinitely graceful dancing in this mysterious fog that drifts only at the mind’s “heart”. I share his first “defect”, my only similarity with this great writer and thinker, and I am now revealing the extent of my struggle with the second. In the case of G. Marquez, both defects are corrected.

October 28, 2003

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.

Blogroll of honor + Websites

The Alex Foundation- Home pageIrene Pepperberg studies cognitive process, teaching and learning in birds. She is problably the most recognized researcher on avian cognition in the world. Alex, her now famous long-time research subject and 'collaborator' recently died at half his life expectancy. Now Wart and Griffin are her collaborators. They are saying and doing things we used to believe that only small children, great apes, and dolphins could do. Her brilliant work deserves better funding.

Minding the PlanetNova is a cognitive scientist and high-tech entrepreneur working on technologies that overcome our information overload. He has founded companies and is now developing interactive internet software, TWINE, that we all need. His thinking covers a great range. He is my Son.